This invention relates generally to a strip of fasteners of the type generally shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,802,476 in the name of James E. Hoadley and assigned to the common assignee of the present invention. Such fasteners have heretofor been individually applied to a strip of double-faced foam type adhesive tape having a backing or strip off layer of paper or other material on one adhesive surface while the other adhesive surface of the strip of tape covers the substantially planar base portion of a plurality of fasteners with the tape but not the backing medium being scored to provide a strip of fasteners. Difficulties have occurred in the manufacture and shipment of such devices since the tape being a highly flexible material does not permit the fasteners to be bulk packaged since a heterogenous mass of such tape strips have a tendency to bend thereby exposing the tape and causing such strips to become tangeled and to adhere to one another through the medium of the pressure sensitive double-faced tape. To overcome this it has been necessary to have an operator at the station where the fastener is assembled to the tape to package such strips by manual handling into neat organized rows in alternating directions for each layer of fasteners in the packing box. This of course is an additional cost factor in the total cost of manufacture.
To collate fasteners for use in application tools is of course old in the art, for example see U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,779,373, 2,784,405, and 2,483,424 similarly the use of strips for manufacturing purposes to facilitate the handling and joining of small items can be seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,793,099 and 2,108,009. A distinctive feature of the collated and stripped manufacturing techniques, however, is generally found in the fact that the individual items are separated from the adjacent item by a shearing mechanism either at the time of installation of the fastener or as a step in the manufacturing process.
Double-faced pressure sensitive foam-type tape of the type utilized in the present invention is generally manufactured in broad sheet form in a continuous operation and thence rolled up. The large rolls are then slit to the desired width with the backing medium separating the rolled layers of pressure sensitive adhesive tape. To cut off pieces of tape and then apply them to individual fasteners creates the problem of removal of the backing paper without disturbing the pressure sensitive tape. The previously described technique of providing a long strip of tape with a plurality of fasteners fixed to one surface was one solution to the problem of permitting a single fastener to be removed along with its double-faced tape from the backing medium by grasping the next adjacent fastener and rolling the first fastener off of the backing medium. As was previously pointed out, however, the flexibility of the tape did not permit bulk packaging directly from the assembly machine due to the exposure of the adhesive surfaces of the tape and their ultimate contact with adjacent fasteners. This problem had to be overcome.